Figure 1: Unpowered Sony Ericsson S500i LCD screen at 200x magnification In our last blog post, I wrote about some of the physics and materials science principles that go into the design and manufacture of liquid-crystal display (LCD) screens. The eponymous liquid crystals (LCs) in such a display have to be quite small in order to create a [...]

We have written about pyrophoric materials in a number of Glew Engineering’s previous blogs on safety in semiconductor fabrication, but have yet to cover how to define it or its danger. At its simplest, a pyrophoric substance is any substance that spontaneously ignites in room temperature air. As one might imagine, spontaneous combustion on contact with the regular atmosphere we live in can be [...]

Thermal Mass Flow Controllers A mass flow controller (MFC) for each gas line in a semiconductor tool’s gas panel measures and regulates the mass flow of the gas in order to set the gas entering the process chamber to the values in the process recipe. While pressure regulation and temperature control are needed for sensitive chemical vapor deposition (CVD), [...]